86 posts categorized "Europe"

May 29, 2008

(I've written the "Business Europe" column for today's Wall Street Journal Europe. The article is on the WSJ website and below. I've added the first picture to this post).

In a big hangar at a former military airfield near Zurich in mid-May, Bertrand Piccard stepped into a prototype airplane cockpit (picture) and began "flying." And kept on going. For 25 hours straight.

The test, followed a day later by another 25-hour dry run with pilot André Borschberg, went well. It was the first real-scale flight simulation for Solar Impulse, an unconventional aircraft designed to circumnavigate the Earth powered uniquely by solar energy, without producing any polluting emissions. Mr. Piccard's team is planning the first real takeoffs in mid-2009, and then a few months later a 36-hour trip aimed at assessing the feasibility of manned nighttime flights – when the energy source, the sun, is "off."

If everything goes according to plan, a five-leg, monthlong tour of the world will follow at some point in 2011 or 2012, with Messrs. Piccard and Borschberg each flying alternating stretches of five days and five nights between landings. "We're not in it just for the adventure," Mr. Piccard told me. The team wants to use this attention-grabbing challenge to inflect energy and climate policies and "to become a testing ground for the development and exploitation of renewable energies and clean technologies" – with an eye also to their future commercial potential.

Crazy? Sun-powered prototype planes have been around for a while. But this would be the first with a man on board; the first to stay aloft day and night; and the first to take off with its own power, after sitting on the runway until the sunrays, and only the sunrays, have charged up its batteries.

In a world dependent upon fossil fuels, the Solar Impulse project is certainly a provocation. But it comes with credentials. It's the brainchild of Mr. Piccard, a 50-year-old Swiss aeronaut and scientist. His legendary grandfather Auguste in 1931 became the first man to reach the stratosphere in a balloon. In 1960 his father, Jacques, together with U.S. Navy Lt. Don Walsh, was the first to reach the deepest trenches of the oceans, the Mariana's, in a bathyscaphe.

Unable to beat them up or down, Bertrand went horizontal. In 1999, alongside Brian Jones of Britain, he completed the first nonstop, round-the-world flight in a hot-air balloon. The duo prevailed over a number of competitors, including Richard Branson.

Mr. Piccard and his team have already lined up €40 million ($63 million) in sponsorship money from Deutsche Bank, Belgian chemical group Solvay, and Swiss watchmaker (and NASA supplier) Omega. The project also has technological and scientific cooperations with French high-tech firms Dassault and Altran, the European Space Agency, and the Swiss Institute of Technology, among others. The project has even received the official patronage of the European Commission, which sees in it "an example of what industry and energy policy makers should be doing to foster energy efficiency and clean mobility."

The first Solar Impulse aircraft, dubbed HB-SIA, is currently under development (picture left: a virtual rendering of what the plane will look like). It will have the weight of a car (a bit less than 2 tons) but the wingspan of an Airbus 320 (about 60 meters; a subsequent version will be 20 meters wider). The wings will be covered with solar cells. Stacks of batteries will store the energy accumulated during daylight to power the four engines at night.

After sunset, the plane will also glide to preserve energy, gradually dropping to 2,000 meters altitude from the cruising level of 8,500, before climbing again. In this scheme, altitude will become a virtual form of energy: The higher they fly during daytime, the longer they will be able to glide during the night. Dawn will be a critical moment: Have they stored enough energy from the day before, and have they been able to glide long enough so that the plane can "encounter" the sun and start recharging the batteries?

The project presents a variety of extreme design and technology challenges, and it may still fly into turbulence. To succeed, Mr. Piccard's team will have to produce or benefit from others' advances in materials and composite structures, which need to be solid and lightweight. They'll also need ultraefficient solar energy capture (cells) and storage (batteries) that don't exist today, along with more-developed aerodynamics and propulsion. "The key is really energy efficiency," explains Mr. Borschberg. "We need to find ways to extract maximal power from minimal energy, and to fly using as little of it as possible."

They will also have to push the boundaries in meteorology, routing and human physiology monitoring. The pilot will be up there alone for days and nights in a row, wearing a special shirt filled with sensors and even a vibrating system that can be remotely activated to wake him up. He will also have to manage his sleep, food intake and other physical needs in a cockpit built to be narrow and spartan, to help keep the airplane light.

Could this technology one day be used on all airplanes? Even Bertrand Piccard doesn't envision solar planes replacing today's aircraft anytime soon. But the Solar Impulse project aims to become a catalyst for the development of solar and other technologies that could lead to future applications in air travel and in areas other than aviation.

A visit to another, sealed-off part of the hangar reveals a skunkworks where cockpit and wings are being assembled, aerodynamics tested, engines miniaturized, software developed, special ultralight and resistant foams shaped into craft parts. Here lies part of the sponsor's interest in supporting the project: The Solvay engineers, for instance, are working on the foams, intended to protect batteries and engines from big temperature differences – and promise significant future commercial applications, should Solar Impulse succeed.

"We want to show people that renewable energy is not a step backwards but a jump into the future," Mr. Piccard told me. "If we can go around the world in a solar aircraft, that means that we can do incredible things with renewables."

November 29, 2007

Panel on "How to encourage creativity, innovation and risk-taking in Europe", moderated by moderated by the BBC's Nik Gowing.

Philippe Li(right in the picture) president of the French-Korean Chamber of commerce, talks about Europe seen from Asia. He says: It's so outdated to still be discussing about store openings on Sundays, or having huge controversies about the export of culture and museums (the Louvre in Abu Dhabi etc). Europe lacks sometimes passion today. From the Asian perspective, I feel that Europeans are becoming so individualistic that are becoming incapable of collective goals, of visions for the entire nation or community. Europe is also losing the value of service. One thing I still can't understand is: you go to Paris or Brussels airport, and you have exactly the same line than in HK or Singapore, but it takes twice to check in in Europe. That goes with the general atmosphere in a country. However, it's true that Europe has achieved great things, unite 27 countries into a free market, virtually eliminated wars. In Europe we have the greatest dreams that have been accomplished.

Lucy Marcus(second from left) CEO of Marcus Venture Consulting, who structures and restructures VC funds. She says: I think we're losing them young, at primary and secondary school level. We're starting too late with our efforts. We can't address risk-taking and entrepreneurship only at business school level: we need to start at nursery school.

Jacques Attali(second from right) who's had (and has) many hats -- banker, entrepreneur, power whisperer, most recently chairman of an advisory committee on growth for French president Sarkozy, and author of 40+ books -- says: I'm not happy with the whole conversation today (Phelps's speech). I trust Europe. I don't believe that Europe is going to be dominated by Asia, that's bullshit, Asia has tons of domestic, infrastructure problems, India may not be staying as a nation for a long time; the US, the dollar is collapsing and we may be at the beginning of a huge 1929 crisis. Europe is not declining, has an enormous future. Of course we have problems, but don't discard Europe. We're number 1 in a lot of dimensions. Of course we have problems, but Europe is today envied by the rest of the world. Most important thing for Europeans is that we have to trust our future -- nobody else will trust it for us. I do agree with Philippe Li, individualism is the death of the future, but it's certainly more visible in the US and in China today than in Europe. Today, the danger of selfishness and individualism is everywhere. In Europe, what's lacking is a strong feeling of a threat.Discussing decline is interesting only if it's the beginning of feeling a threat and of a reaction, a call to action. To react, we need strong leadership, to serve as door opener for the future. We are just starting to feel the threat, but leadership is not yet here. Will it come at European or national level, it's still a question mark.

Ziga Turk(left) is the Minister for Growth of Slovenia. He engages in an rather flat academic lesson: Key question is: do you buy stuff that you need or that you think you need? Do you pay for the function of the stuff you buy, or for its meaning? The future belongs to meaning-makers: not to engineers, not to rational math-thinking person, but to creative meaning-makers (BG: this is from Dan Pink). This is why we are seeing a war for talent. Economies are not fighting for energy or for food: they're trying to provide an attractive environment for talent. We have to start young, with creativity, because creativity means that you dare to do things differently. (BG: Slovenia will have the next rotating presidency of the EU: as a European, this speech worries me).

Claude Smadja (from the audience): The financial system and mentality in Europe remains bank-centered, and this is a thing of the past. At this stage, there is progress in terms of the development of venture capitalism and financial markets, but as long as we have a political mentality that remains bank-centered in Europe, we have a tremendous problem. (BG: isn't the better-developed US financial market that hit the subprime wall?). The problem with Europe is that it has programs, it doesn't have projects. Programs are based on bureaucratic thinking. Asia has projects. Europe (the EU) was built on a defensive mood.

My friend Ann Mettler(photo) co-founded the Lisbon Council, a think-tank in Brussels, and she starts her speech by strongly taking issue with the previous speech by Ed Phelps. Europe is doing much better than the bleak portrait painted by Phelps, she says, productivity growth for example is higher than in the US. What Europe urgently needs, she says, is a stronger focus on education skills and human capital, which are the defining way to raise your competitiveness. Going forward, our international competitiveness is depending entirely on how well we do on developing human capital and attracting talent.Also, on social cohesion: Europeans don't need to be embarrassed that we have a very good social system; but we need to take into account the fact that it's becoming increasingly difficult to be a low-skilled workers and not have sufficient education.Europe, she says, is under-investing in education across the board, from pre-primary to university. We like to think of ourselves as a knowledge economy, but if you look at the number of people who have college degrees or more, only in 9 of the 27 EU member states they are more than 25% of the workforce.Italy is the most striking example: over 50% of its workforce falls in the category of low-skilled, only 10% are highly skilled. This is a G-8 country, and it will have a very difficult time sustaining its status.Let's do a Lisbon Agenda reality check. One of the targets in the LB was a 3% of GDP invested in R&D. In order to really get there, Europe would need 600'000 additional researchers by 2010. But even if we could spend that 3%, we wouldn't have the researchers to do that, our universities don't graduate enough of them. Another target is a 70% employment. Among the highly skilled, employment is at 82%; among the low-skilled: 46%. We are not going to be able to find jobs in the future for low-skilled people. We still have a long way to go before we have a dynamic knowledge-based economy. We need a massive and sustained investment across the board in people, young and old, women and immigrants, every person in Europe needs to be invested in. Education needs to become much more of a "hard policy" issue, a core finance and economics issue.She mentions the paradigmatic shift happening in Denmark around the concept of "flexicurity" (from Wikipedia: "a welfare state model with a pro-active labour-market policy). Denmark has full employment today. 30% of its workforce will change jobs every given year. There are strong training policies: every Danish worker is entitled to two weeks of training a year, paid for by the employer.I keep hearing that Europe is slow-moving, but I see alot of dynamic and very innovative companies. I keep hearing that the European labor market is sclerotic, but the reality is that 40% of Europeans work on non-traditional contracts and another 15% is self-employed, so the majority of Europeans aren't into lifelong corporate jobs. A problem is the size of companies. 99.8 % of European companies are small and medium entreprises, their average size is 5. In the US is 19. So the problem is company growth and commercialization of products and services. Governments keep focusing on getting more people to become entrepreneurs; we need to focus much more on the companies and get them to grow.

The theme of this year's Future of Europe Summit is "Addressing Europe's brainpower challenge"
-- which means assuming that Europe has a brainpower problem. And
indeed, several countries have been experiencing difficulties in
attracting top talent from elsewhere, and others are actually victims
of a brain-drain (people moving to Silicon Valley or -- newly -- to the
rising global cities of Dubai and Shanghai, for example). Possible
answers of course include increasing research and development efforts
and creating a more flexible economic environment.

After the welcome words from Andorra's Prime minister Albert Pintat, the first session features Enrique Iglesias, secretary-general of the Ibero-American cooperation secretariat, and Kishore Mahbubani,
Dean of the School of public policy at the National University of
Singapore and former Singaporean ambassador to the UN, and author of "Can Asians think?" (a very controversial book when it came out about 6 years ago), with Claude Smadja, the conference's produce, moderating.

Smadja introduces by talking about the surge of Asia and its implications:
During hundreds of years, the Western world (+ Japan) had the monopoly
in terms of knowledge creation and innovation. This monopoly is now put
into question and is becoming a matter of the past. India today has 70
billion dollars in software exports. Add to that engineering, financial
services, automotive parts, pharma, etc.. China is producing the
biggest part of manufacturing goods in the world, but it's also about
biotech, stem-cell development, aerospace industry, software (12
billion USD in exports last year). So we're talking about a new
situation in which Europe will have to fight very hard to keep its
position and manage its capabilities to remain in the top tier of the
global economic players. We're not talking about 30 years down the
road: we're talking about the next 7 to 10 years, things are moving at
exponential pace.

Iglesias: we're all conscious that we're living a change of
epoch in the economic world. Changes in the system of production, in
the nature of our output, in productivity, in the nature of
international economic relations. How do we move in this world? Europe
is trying to attract people with very selective immigration policies:
we (BG: he talks about Latin America) have a problem with that.
There are two or three areas where Europe and Latin America can work
together: Europe helping us in the training of our human resources;
private sector should also be interested in having industries moving to
the region; sharing these human resources (people working part of the
year in the North and the rest in the South, leveraging the
seasonality).

Mahbubani (he just finished a new book, "The New Asian Hemisphere"): The 19th century, was a European century. The 20th, was the American century. The 21st will be the Asian century. Just
as Europe had difficulties adjusting to the American century, it will
have bigger difficulties adjusting to the Asian century. I
understand there can be a certain degree of doubt: is this for real?
Part of my confidence is based on the fact that if you look at history,
back 2000 years, the two largest economies in the world were
consistently China and India. Why is it happening now? Not because Asia has rediscovered some old Asian wisdom: what the Asians have finally figured out are the 7 pillars of Western wisdom, which enabled the West to succeed. And, by the way, how much does Europe still believe in them? Here they are:

Free market economics: today the greater believers are
the Asians, the Chinese are deeply committed to free market economics,
one reason why China was very keen to join the WTO is because they
believe that by complying with those standards it will become the most
competitive economy in the world (Russia doesn't want to join because
they feel the WTO rules are an imposition on them; the Chinese believe
they're a gift to them).

Science and technology: Europe became dominant for centuries
because it surged ahead in its mastery of science and tech. But if you
extrapolate from what you see on campuses and colleges today, by 2010
70-90% of all new PhDs in science and engineering will be held by
Asians.

Meritocracy: why is Brasil a soccer superpower but
economically a medium power? Because when it comes to soccer, they look
everywhere, they search for the best players in cities as well as in
slums; but when they look for economic talent, they only look to the
upper or medium class. Asians have discovered that the millions of
brains that were not used for centuries are now being used. In India,
even the "untouchables" are being given education and are integrated
into the economy, it's a silent revolution.

Pragmatism: it's an ancient Western practice. Asians have
becoming the best copycat nations in the world. As Deng Xiaoping said:
"it doesn't matter if a cat is white or black, if it catches mice". In
most of Asia, the ideological debates are left behind.

Culture of peace: In the region where we saw the biggest war
since WW2, the guns are now silent. Asians have not got to the "zero
prospect of war" that Europe has achieved, but it's moving in the right
direction.

Rule of law: the country that is producing the largest number of new laws in the world is China.

Education: the hunger for education in Asia is phenomenal.
In many ways, the gold standard for education now is being set by Asian
countries, starting with Singapore.

(BG: no mention of democracy and political openness in his list, but
after hearing him speak, his book -- to be published in February --
goes straight into my to-read list).

Smadja: At a certain point we will have to ask ourselves in
Europe what's the price of virtue. What's happening in Europe in
stem-cell research is creating a wide boulevard for China to become the
leading country in this field. The current hysteria in Europe about the
environment is also likely to push industries to migrate. (BG: readers of this blog know that I strongly disagree with this last point, but that's for another post).

Jan van den Biesen (a Philips VP, in the audience): My
company has moved a lot of activities to China, and we're often blamed
for that. Sure, at the beginning it was for cheap labor, but now it's
because there is where the markets are. But then, what's next? Just
being a knowledge economy in Europe will not be good enough: we need to
encourage creativity. But even that can be copied. So what we should do
is be able to continuously change and adapt in a dynamic way. A comment
on meritocracy: when I look at what my children get at school is rather
mediocrecy: being mediocre is good enough. When you see the
zeal, the drive that exist in Asia, that's clearly lacking here. (He
refers to a current Dutch strike claiming reduction of school hours).
If we continue like this, I know the future of Europe: in a few
years we will be so poor that manufacturing will come back to Europe,
because of cheap labor!

Mahbubani: Democracy is not critical variable. India is an open society with a close mind; China is a close society with an open mind. This is something that many in the West have not understood. Even if China is politically closed, it's one of the most open societies in the world.
That's one of the reasons why US universities are rushing to partner
with Chinese universities: because they're becoming thought leaders. If
you focus only on democracy, you may not see the whole picture. Perhaps
the most meritocratic organization in the world today is the Communist
Party of China, despite the lack of democracy.Cross-partnership:
it's not a zero-sum game, Europe and Asia and America can grow
together. But Asia has had a bruising experience with Europe. In the
mid-1990s a partnership was started, but then the Asian financial
crisis came and Europe lost interest, sending the message that "we like
you when you're doing well, less when you aren't doing well": Europe
needs to send a clear partnership message to Asia that will be
consistent in good as in bad times. Nobody knows what's gonna come in
the future, as we say in Asia "he who speaks about the future lies,
even when it tells the truth". But you can foretell certain things: millions
of minds opening up, there is a huge explosion of cultural confidence
among young people in Asia, a conviction that tomorrow belongs to them,
it will be very hard to resist the forces of change coming from Asia

The conference is about to start (it's part of an ongoing effort by the government of Andorra to diversify the country's economy and improve its business environment; for a bit of background see the first paragraph in this post from last year). I'll be moderating a couple of sessions. At the opening cocktail yesterday evening, French essayist, entrepreneur and political whisperer Jacques Attali gave a short talk saying that "if you look at the history of Europe, the core strength has always been with cities: Bruges, Venice, Genoa, Amsterdam, London". Even when you look at the empires, the Roman and the British, they both were built around "leader cities", Rome and London, that dominated their known world.What are the qualities that make cities and small states strong? Attali listed six:

access to new technology (in the broader sense)

access to ways of financing the new technology

openness to ideas and people/multiplicity of cultures

political elites willing to push things forward

a feeling/awareness of threat

and the capacity to participate in networks

(BG: I would add an environment offering good quality of life). The first session will start in a few minutes. I will liveblog at least part of the conference.

October 01, 2007

Conferences focusing on innovation and creativityare multiplying across Europe. Nine of the best ones have just joined in an informal alliance (name to be announced soon) to "make the events better,
simpler to attend, coordinated in terms of date and topics covered" and, especially, to "strengthen the position of Europe on the global map of innovation".

The nine events are complementary -- different countries, no major scheduling conflicts -- and they hope, by cooperating on joint promotion and sponsoring, coordinating topics, and sharing information to improve the overall experience for both conference-goers and organizers (press release as PDF).

July 02, 2007

The railroad companies of France, Switzerland, Austria, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany and the Eurostar (London-Paris) announced today in Brussels that they're joining to form the Railteam alliance to establish high-speed trains as a credible alternative to car or regional airlines, linking up 400 cities along 4700 km of tracks (map below). "The goal is to position trains as the natural choice for every European business journey under four hours of duration" and for leisure travels under six hours, the CEO of France's SNCF (the railroad of the speed-record-setting train TGV) wrote today in the Wall Street Journal. The companies will interconnect their reservation systems and timetables, provide multilingual information, guarantee travel on the next available train of they miss a connection regardless of the type of ticket, and launch a "frequent traveler" program giving "train miles". 150 billion euros will be invested across Europe's rail infrastructure in the next 12 years.

Spectacular differences. Some of the them can be explained by technical reasons (fiber optic vs copper wires etc), some by the overall living costs in a given country. Most of the high prices however are tied to lack of competition and of innovation in a specific market.

June 09, 2007

With the launch, yesterday, of their website, more details are now available about the Picnic Green Challenge -- 500'000 euros and a few add-ons (coaching etc) to win for "a carbon-reducing product or service that will contribute to an eco-friendly lifestyle" - that I blogged about last week:

Ideas should be executable (the entry documentation is basically a business plan): "We’re looking for products and services that will directly reduce carbon emissions. They should contribute to an eco-friendly lifestyle. In other words, they will enable large numbers of people to effortlessly reduce their personal impact on global warming. They’ll be convenient, well designed and of overall high quality" (full list of entry criteria).

The organizers (the Picnic conference and the Dutch Postcode Lottery) "prefer that ideas have
to do with IT and new media" but in truth, "the only limit is your
imagination" (and if you check out the examples they're listing on the site, there is little IT for now).

Deadline to submit entries is August 15. A shortlist will be drafted early September, and the award ceremony take place September 29 in Amsterdam, the closing day of the Picnic07 conference.

As I said in the previous post, the PGC is a very interesting initiative, not only because of the amount of money on the table. It brings together two powerful concurrent ideas: the social-change catalyzing award (à la TEDprize) and the competition-fuels-innovation approach(à la X-Prize). The organizers face some challenges of their own: short lead time; need to internationalize both the applicants and the jury; and this is possibly too much money for a first year and for a single winner (for what it's worth, my suggestion to the organizers is to leave it to the jury to decide whether there will be a single winner or if the prize money should be divided among two or three).

May 29, 2007

Must-read story in the New York Times today about the cyberattack on Estonia of the last few weeks, a wake-up call for everyone -- for individuals as well as governments -- about cybervulnerability and electronic warfare. The attacks started in the wake of the Estonian authorities' decision to relocate a Soviet-era World War II memorial. Keep in mind that Estonia is one of the most wired countries in the world. It's the kind of place where, when president Bush visits, he receives a Skype phone -- the Skype software was developed there -- as the official government's present (see these previousposts). As the NYT writes, for people there "the Internet is almost as vital as running
water; it is used routinely to vote, file their taxes, and, with their
cellphones, to shop or pay for parking". I don't have the time to elaborate today, will come back to this in a few days, but here the key excerpts of the NYT story (also published in the IHT):

What followed was what some here describe as the first war in
cyberspace, a monthlong campaign that has forced Estonian authorities
to defend their pint-size Baltic nation from a data flood that they say
was set off by orders from Russia or ethnic Russian sources in retaliation for the removal of the statue. (...) The Russian government has denied any involvement in the attacks,
which came close to shutting down the country’s digital infrastructure,
clogging the Web sites of the president, the prime minister, Parliament
and other government agencies, staggering Estonia’s biggest bank and
overwhelming the sites of several daily newspapers. “It turned
out to be a national security situation,” Estonia’s defense minister,
Jaak Aaviksoo, said in an interview. “It can effectively be compared to
when your ports are shut to the sea.” (...) The first digital intruders slipped into Estonian cyberspace at 10
p.m. on April 26 (...) By April 29, Tallinn’s
streets were calm again after two nights of riots caused by the
statue’s removal, but Estonia’s electronic Maginot Line was crumbling.
In one of the first strikes, a flood of junk messages was thrown at the
e-mail server of the Parliament, shutting it down. In another, hackers
broke into the Web site of the Reform Party, posting a fake letter of apology from the prime minister. (...)

The bulk of the cyberassaults used a technique known as a
distributed denial-of-service attack. By bombarding the country’s Web
sites with data, attackers can clog not only the country’s servers, but
also its routers and switches, the specialized devices that direct
traffic on the network. To magnify the assault, the hackers
infiltrated computers around the world with software known as bots, and
banded them together in networks to perform these incursions. The
computers become unwitting foot soldiers, or “zombies,” in a
cyberattack. (...) The attackers used a giant network of bots — perhaps as many as one
million computers in places as far away as the United States and
Vietnam — to amplify the impact of their assault. In a sign of their
financial resources, there is evidence that they rented time on other
so-called botnets. (...)

In the early hours of May 9, traffic spiked to thousands of times the
normal flow. May 10 was heavier still, forcing Estonia’s biggest bank
to shut down its online service for more than an hour. Even now, the
bank, Hansabank, is under assault and continues to block access to 300
suspect Internet addresses. It has had losses of at least $1 million. (...) Estonia’s defense was not flawless. To block hostile data, it had to
close off large parts of its network to people outside the country. (...) Though Estonia cannot be sure of the attackers’ identities, their plans
were posted on the Internet even before the attack began. On
Russian-language forums and chat groups, the investigators found
detailed instructions on how to send disruptive messages, and which
Estonian Web sites to use as targets. (...) Because of the murkiness of the Internet — where attackers can mask
their identities by using the Internet addresses of others, or remotely
program distant computers to send data without their owners even
knowing it — several experts said that the attackers would probably
never be caught. (...) “The Internet is perfect for plausible deniability.”

1998-99—Moonlight Maze: America traces a series of computer break-ins at the Pentagon, NASA and elsewhere to a computer in Russia (which denies involvement). Many files containing classified information are compromised.

1999—Kosovo:
Chinese hackers break in and vandalise American government websites in
retaliation for the bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade by
American aircraft. The White House website closes for three days.

2001–America v China: After an American spyplane
and Chinese fighter collide, hackers from both countries deface or
crash the other's public and private-sector websites. The White House and the NYT sites are briefly brought down.

2006—Sneaky Word Doc: An American State Department
employee opens an e-mailed file that secretly opens a backdoor in the
computer system, allowing the theft of data. As the problem escalates,
the agency cuts internet access, leaving some officials offline for
weeks.

UPDATE June 15: Follow-up story from the WSJafter the April-May cyberattack against Estonia: At a meeting of NATO defense ministers in Brussels, US Defense Secretary Robert Gates urged Western nations to begin planning how they would respond to a cyber attack. One key issue: deciding at what point a cyber attack constitutes a breach of NATO's Article 5, which holds that an attack on one member is considered an attack on all of the alliance. "If a full-on [cyber] attack cripples an electric grid or shuts down a country's oil fields or something like that, does that constitute an Article 5 attack?" said a senior U.S. defense official.